Ever Deepening

Crime

America has a problem with crime. The statistics are demoralizing: 40%
of all African-American males will spend time in jail. Meth usage is
estimated at 4 million. Corporate malfeasance has left pension plans with
tens of billions of dollars in unfunded commitments.

Formally, a crime is prosecuted as a violation of law. But why pass a
law with punitive measures for failure to comply? Only with the goal of
preventing harm to individuals or society as a whole. We wish to deter evil acts, as I have defined
evil herein: a systematic strategy to deny us the resources needed to
sustain and enhance our power.

In murder trials, the prosecution differentiates between "premeditated"
and "unpremeditated" acts. This thinking pervades legal practice. There
are acts taken solely for the purpose of denying power to others. Then
there are acts - the most auspicious currently are crimes against the
global ecology - that are "incidental" to the production of value. Our
legal process tends to be far more forgiving of the latter, perhaps
because we believe that the undesirable consequences of productive
endeavor are distributed across many actors, making it nearly impossible
to anticipate their magnitude until the crisis is upon us.

Both deterrence and premeditation are dangerous concepts.

Deterrence is not a solution to crime. It is part of the problem. It
focuses our attention on the things that we as matureadults must not do,
rather than the way we should be.

An anecdote is illustrative. As I was seeking a context to relate my
message, I was guided to a spiritual counselor. In the course of our
discussions, we would have moments of frision. After one particularly
intense episode, he looked at me accusingly: "I worked as a minister in a
drug treatment center, and I know the signs of cocaine addiction."

As I've never used illegal drugs in my life, the only response I can
formulate to this accusations is: Drug abuse is a way of bringing into
our lives the sensations and energy that love should to supply.
However, while love's
energy is liberated from efficiency and dimensional deepening, drug
abuse draws down our physiological store. If unchecked, abuse leads to
disability or death.

"Love is the anti-drug" is the wrong way around: "Drugs are the
anti-love." Substance abuse is a consequence of the absence of love from
our lives.

This work should also make clear that a failure to foresee ruin in
distributed systems is a premeditation of ignorance. It is ignorance
sustained by cultural choices that partition the domains of masculine and
feminine influence. (The partitioning has diverse psychological
motivations, but one worthy of mention is the prejudice that masculine and
feminine integration requires sexual congress. This is an avenue for
initiates, but I believe we will find that it is not a requirement to the
cognoscenti.) When the domains integrate, feminine awareness couples
to male innovation to address the crisis before it occurs. That the
partitioned system survives is due to the general lack of awareness of the
benefits of masculine and feminine integration. This has made it
impossible for the lower classes - the ultimate victims of greed - to
reflect ill will back onto the perpetrators of their loss.

What these two declarations illustrate is that criminal behavior is a
form of self-hatred. It is encouraged and sustained by choices that make
us less than we could be. The best way to combat it is to open our eyes -
and the eyes of our children - to the full possibility of human potential,
and the role of self- and other-love in that development.